The five goriest films to watch now — can you stomach them?

How easily are you shocked? Cinema has a long history of films that push the boundaries of gore, horrifying audiences with their graphic violence and brutal imagery. And they’re just as popular as ever — with Damien Leone’s Terrifier 3 triumphing at the box office and Coralie Fargeat’s gnarly body horror The Substance disturbing cinemagoers.

Here we select five of the goriest films that you can watch now. All these films contain graphic violence that tests even the most hardened horror fans, so prepare yourself.

• The rise of gory horror: Terrifier 3 makes Stephen King look kid-friendly

What’s your favourite gory film? Which films have made you squirm and jump? Let us know in the comments below.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

1974, buy/rent on Shudder
Tobe Hooper’s relentless shocker is deliciously grim. It follows a group of friends, a family of cannibals and a chainsaw-wielding madman named Leatherface. The idea came to the writer and director Hooper when he spotted a display of chainsaws in a busy department store. “I thought, ‘Ooh, I know how I could get out of this place fast.’” A year after it was released the British Board of Film Classification banned it for 24 years.

The Thing

1982, buy/rent
John Carpenter’s cult horror stars a young Kurt Russell as a researcher in the Antarctic who encounters an alien that can disguise itself as any human or animal it meets. The body-snatching creature then escapes and causes chaos — and some of the grossest special effects yet put on film. The skull spider is hard to forget.

Braindead

1992, buy/rent
Before the director Peter Jackson ventured into Middle-earth, he made this low-budget horror comedy. Tim Balme stars as a New Zealander who tries to conceal that his mother has become a flesh-eating zombie. It starts with a zoologist having his arms bitten off by a rat-monkey and ends with zombies being liquidised in a lawnmower. The DVD release in some countries came with a sick bag.

The Saw franchise

2004, Saw I, II, III, Jigsaw on Netflix, X on Prime Video, IV and V, VI, 3D and Spiral available to buy/rent
James Wan and Leigh Whannell’s torture porn series somehow hasn’t run out of steam despite hitting its tenth instalment last year. The franchise has featured actors from Danny Glover to Samuel L Jackson, but the true stars are the traps that the gruesome, game-playing serial killer known as Jigsaw lays out for his victims. The goriest ones involve bear traps and gallons of rancid pig blood. The films have made over $1 billion at the box office and an 11th is to be released next year. If you’re brave enough, the third is the goriest.

Inside

2007, buy/rent
At the turn of the century, a wave of boundary-pushing films by French directors hit cinemas. The gory highlight of the movement called New French Extremity is Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo’s slasher. The story focuses on a mourning expectant widow who is preparing to have her baby on Christmas Day. Home alone, she is visited by a mysterious woman. Brutal and uncompromising, you may need to turn away for the final scene — and a lot of the rest of it for that matter.

What’s your favourite gory film? Let us know in the comments below

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